Closed and opened doors
by Owlishian
Summary: Life at the flat goes on and on as relationships and circumstances change. Sometimes there's soup and sometimes you're starving. Very short pieces about johnlock, with a bit of Mary/John/Sherlock in there, too.


_Author's note: I haven't watched Sherlock in, like, months. Years, maybe. So maybe there will be errors or people being ooc here, I don't know. I just wanted to get this out of my head and onto paper (or computer screen). I really like the thought of Mary/John/Sherlock OT3... I don't know if this should be rated M, but better safe than sorry._

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1.

The first time Sherlock kissed John, they had been running though the street and up the stairs until they collapsed outside the door to 221B. Sherlock had been laughing the entire time - it had been a particularly good case - and he leant forward, quickly, to place a kiss on John's lips. His hands were around John's hips and John's hands had been on his and then they separated and stumbled inside and gasped for breath and were high on adrenaline.

John found that - after initial confusion, self-discovery and consideration -_ he didn't mind_. And he hadn't needed to say it out loud when Sherlock had been reading every little cue, movement of his eyes or flex of his fingers, and there had been no awkward conversations, and John had made tea and they had both been _home_.

Weeks passed.

2.

The door to 221B opened slowly as John pushed inside, a heavy plastic bag in both hands. He made his way to the kitchen, which was far from an easy task (Sherlock had been up to something involving an awful lot of strange boxes with "Danger"-stickers on them lately) and placed the groceries on the counter. He began to unpack and was half-way through the second bag when he felt a hand on his shoulder and a kiss, fleeting and light, on his cheek. Then Sherlock had already waltzed into the living room from which John soon after heard the sound of cardboard being cut, tape ripping and a geiger-counter beeping very quickly.

John shrugged and continued sorting the vegetables. Sherlock's work making a mess of the apartment was nothing new, and neither were the kisses; there were quick ones on his cheek or forehead or the kisses on his lips reserved for the triumphant moment after a particularly difficult deduction. Still, it was much more common for their hands to suddenly find each other or for Sherlock to sit beside John on the couch while he wrote, close enough that he could feel warmth. There was never anything more risky than that, though, nor anything outside of the flat.  
John didn't know how he felt about that.  
John checked his watch.  
"Do we eat around 7 o'clock or should I just leave something in the fridge for you?" he asked, loudly so that Sherlock, engrossed in his work surrounded by beeping machinery, could hear him.  
"You're cooking?" was the answer.  
"_Yes_, I'm cooking. You can't keep living off of takeout forever."  
"Hm."  
A quick glance into the living room revealed that Sherlock had a bunch of different rocks and chunks of minerals lined up on the table. He spent half the time measuring and photographing and the other half typing frantically at his computer.  
"How's the investigation going?" John asked.  
"This is a boring one, John! The clue about the high amount of radiation the victim had received makes it almost trivial. In a moment I'll be able to pin-point where she was killed..." Sherlock's voice died out as he began to pace back and forth. John counted the footsteps - one, two, three and a sharp turn, one, two, three...  
"Are those rocks radioactive?" he asked.  
"John, I promise you won't get cancer."  
"That's not an answer."  
"Maybe."  
"Then, are they, um, going to be around in the living room for a while?"  
"I can put them in my bedroom if you'd like. After these experiments, which I'll remind you might save a couple of lives."  
"That'd be nice", John said, "I like to see the floor."  
John suspected that Sherlock's room was beginning to be quite a mess given how so many of the things he used for cases eventually ended up there. John didn't know for sure - that door was closed, just like Sherlock never went into John's room. John looked down at the potatoes he was peeling as his thoughts began to wander in an unfortunate direction - the idea of Sherlock being with John, in his room, or them sleeping together in both meanings of the word - and the idea wasn't entirely foreign to him and - he swallowed - he had thought about it more than once in the shower. And he knew that Sherlock knew that (the detective always knew). Yet Sherlock had never made even a hint of a move in that direction, and John was quite sure that Sherlock was in fact asexual, or something like it. John assured himself that if something needed to happen, it would happen naturally in time.  
"Sherlock?" John raised his voice again. "Where is the salt?"  
"Isn't it in the salt shaker?"  
"I don't know what this is, but it's _not_ salt."  
"Oh, right..." For a moment, the noise from the other room ceased. "Try the container on the left. The one that says 'paprika' on it. I used the shaker for-"  
"I don't want to know."  
"Glad I could help, now anyway-" and the beeping and rustling resumed.  
When John's soup was finally simmering on the stove, 30 minutes had passed. He took a seat opposite Sherlock at the table and began laying the foundation for another blog post. In the mean time, Sherlock had finished whatever it was that he had been doing, and was either dozing off or thinking; either way he was looking at the ceiling and tilting his chair back. John allowed himself to stare for a moment before he resumed his work.  
"I think it's about to boil over, John," said Sherlock.  
"Nonsense, I just-"  
John was cut off by the sound of the soup boiling and water hissing when it touched the hot surface of the stove. John swore.  
In the end, it turned out to be edible even though Sherlock was suspicious about it. It wasn't normal for them to eat face to face at the actual table, given how often it was cluttered with paper and laptops and old coffee cups, but John (carefully) laid the rocks in a pile on the couch and moved the papers aside. Sherlock spent the whole meal talking and afterwards the evening was surprisingly routine. When John went to bed Sherlock was still up and about, drawing and drinking coffee. John shut the bedroom door behind him and sighed lightly.

3.

Whatever needed to happen would happen in time, John had thought.  
Only when he stood at the door to 221B a few months later did it occur to him that maybe, it would be time they never had. There was nobody home, there would never _be_ anyone home to wait for him, and he had a feeling that the flat would never even be a home anymore. Sherlock's body laid broken and buried in a graveyard, but his things were still there, scattered about as evidence that he had lived there once upon a time.  
It was a while since he died now, but it was hard to come back.  
The clock in the living room was broken, but the geiger-counter in Sherlock's room kept ticking away. The sound was almost the same. Out of the corner of his eye, John saw bodies and limbs under the white sheets instead of books and discarded objects; the unsolved murder of a life that could have been. Nothing had been taken, nothing moved except for Sherlock's laptop, which had been confiscated by his brother and a group of men in suits. John didn't know if they had been in Sherlock's room too. He stood in front of the door and rested his hand on the handle, unsure of whether to push of pull away. The man was dead, he thought. What could he find that would hurt anybody?

He opened the door slowly.  
There it was - that smell of home, which he only know realized was the smell of old furniture, strange things in petri dishes, Mrs. Hudson's potpourri, dust and Sherlock himself. All of these things except the most important were present in the small room. There were boxes piled high and shelves filled with books and letters and hangers with clothes scattered around. Sherlock's bed showed clear signs of someone sleeping only on the very edge of the left side, and slowly, as if afraid to disturb anything, John sat down and let his hand follow the creases the bed sheet made around the depression.  
For a brief moment John laid on the other half of the bed, on the right side, and imagined that Sherlock was still alive.

4.

Sherlock was still alive. He greeted John and opened the door to 221B, and John stepped inside, took off his coat and stood still for a moment, well aware that Sherlock was standing just a little further away than he used to (why did he still remember those small things years later?). Sherlock paused too, and John guessed he was considering where they were now. A glance at John's hand was enough to make him turn around. John followed him into the flat and sat down on the couch. The room had only grown more cluttered now that John didn't live there anymore.  
Sherlock hovered around the living room until John called him over, after which he sat with his legs crossed and his hands folded over a knee. There was an attempt at small-talk; it didn't matter and John knew that he wouldn't remember it later.

What mattered was Sherlock's reaction when John leant forward and told him that he missed the flat and their life as it had been and the home they had had. He knew that Sherlock knew most of the things he would have had to spell out for ordinary people, so he only said the things he knew Sherlock needed to hear. He told him that their relationship was fine, that the kisses were fine, that life with Mary was fine but with Sherlock, too, it would be so much better. That Mary _knew,_ that she thought the kisses were fine, too.

There was a hand on his leg, the leg that he had been dragging along for months on end before he began running and stumbling. The hand was comforting and warm. They both sat on their couch in the messy old flat with _something_ ticking away somewhere behind bullet-riddled walls and doors, open and closed. John didn't know if it was the geiger counter or if someone had fixed the clock - honestly, he didn't care. There would be time enough.


End file.
